Dana Milbank On Obama Speech: “Skip The Falsehoods, Mr. Obama”

So, Thursday, Obama gave his big “rebooting” speech, which amounted to a hodge podge of every other speech he’s given over the last 5 years, including his election 2008 speeches. He offered nothing new, including his whining. Politicker has a selection of media tweets, which includes MSNBC’s Mike O’Brien begging Obama to stop after 20 minutes (yes, the speech was 54 minutes long, which is a long time to say nothing). Of course the NY Times editorial board, despite finding the speech “endless”, cheerleads the endless speech. Then there’s Leftist Dana Milbank at the Washington Post

I had high hopes for President Obama’s speech on the economy. But instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.

Well, he was probably one of about 5 people who had high hopes for what was billed as a major speech that would contain no new policy plans. This was simply part of the Obama presidency pattern: When the going gets tough, Obama gives a speech. Which assigns Blame to everybody and anything but Obama. Throws a few well worn ideas that have already been shown to be losers out on the table telling Someone Else to actually do the hard work in implementing them while he runs off to yet another fundraiser.

The falsehood is that he has been serious about cutting government spending. The fallacy is that this election will be some sort of referendum that will break the logjam in Washington.

Milbank goes on to describe the fallacy, which ends with the notion that breaking the logjam requires compromise, not conquest. Remember, Obama set the table early on with his “I won” sayings, guaranteed to make sure that Republicans would refuse to work with him. There’s also the notion that yes, politics does often require compromise, however you don’t compromise when you know that the policies are destructive.

And that leads to the falsehood. Despite his claim that “both parties have laid out their policies on the table,” Obama has made no serious proposal to fix the runaway entitlement programs that threaten to swamp the government’s finances.

Instead, Obama’s speech was a rehash of earlier proposals – such as sending more Americans to community college and spending more on clean energy. Those plans for additional spending would be more credible if he had a plausible plan to reform entitlement spending, the biggest driver of future debt.

What’s the point in sending people to college if there are no jobs for them once they graduate? Clean energy is a worthy goal, yet pissing the money away on projects bound to fail, and, incidentally, funneling the money to campaign contributors, has turned people away from Obama’s version.

54: Minutes That Obama Spent Telling Us He Doesn’t Have Any Better Ideas Than Raising Taxes.

$154,236,273: Amount Added To National Debt During Obama’s Speech.

$1.9 Trillion: New Taxes Proposed By Obama That He Says Will Make Everything Better.

Whining isn’t cute from a 5 year old: it’s less attractive from a man who campaigned for the job of POTUS and not only will take no responsibility and refuses to put in the hard work, but refuses to offer any policy plans that work.